By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

THE Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) and the press have tended to restrict the concept of ‘voter education’ to explaining provisions of the law on elections and demonstrating the mechanics of the voting process.
Both ZEC and the press have avoided history as an integral part of ‘voter education’.
One lesson, among many, which I can think of centres around the rise of Adolph Hitler and the growth of fascism in Germany.
Hitler’s National Socialist Party (the Nazis) was a youth movement based on the exploitation of the trauma of economic depression and sanctions upon young people.
It was a youth movement, not only hostile to democracy, but openly contemptuous of all democratic institutions.
At the very same time, however, the Nazis realised that in order to ultimately capture the citadels of power, they had to take part in elections in order to capture power for the purpose of destroying the very same democratic structures as soon as they acquired power.
In other words, for the Nazis, democratic structures and institutions would be tolerated only where, and if, they appeared to serve the Nazi goal of capturing power.
The Nazis sought to manipulate the rules without playing by the book.
The characteristics of the Nazis included the following:
– A youth movement without any meaningful participation of elders;
– Very long on grievances and hatreds but vague and short on actual programmes;
– Driven by anti-establishment violent action and the scapegoating of racial minorities and established democratic institutions;
– A youth movement with a violent militia used to intimidate opponents and to denigrate national institutions for the purpose of ultimately destroying all democratic structures and institutions after using the same to capture power;
– A youth movement specialised and steeped in the art of telling and broadcasting big lies.
Hitler believed that in order for lies to be useful as propaganda, they had to be really big lies like US$15 billion, 250 000 ghost voters on the roll or bullet trains and big airports for ferrying tomatoes from Murehwa to Mbare.
But, according to historian Gordon A. Craig:
“For Hitler and his followers, the electoral success of September 1930 (by the Nazis) raised different but urgent new problems of tactics and timing… because he was sure that Hindenburg, Brüning and Groener would not hesitate to use the full resources of the state power against a putsch (a violent and terrorist seizure of power) the Führer (Hitler) had resolved to seek power by legal means, that is by establishing his right to the chancellorship through electoral strength and parliamentary manoeuvre.
‘In principle’, Hitler explained to his followers in Munich shortly after the elections, ‘We are not a parliamentary party because this would contradict our whole conception (of Nazism).
We are merely forced to be a parliamentary party and what forces us is the constitution… The victory that we have just won is nothing less than the acquisition of a new weapon for our (fascist) struggle.”
So, for Hitler’s youth, the Constitution was a nuisance to be shredded after capturing power.
According to Craig:
“In 1928 the Nazis had polled 809 000 votes and won 12 Reichstag seats; in September 1930 their vote was 6 400 000, which meant that 107 brown-shirts (Hitler youths) were going to march into the new Reichstag (or Parliament).”
The effects of devastating economic sanctions upon the people of Germany between 1928 and 1930 had driven some of them into the arms of the Nazis.
But the Nazis were still more honest and patriotic than some Zimbabwean opposition parties today.
The Nazis opposed the economic sanctions bitterly, even though they exploited the suffering of the people caused by those sanctions. In contrast the MDC first asked for the sanctions and then manipulated the effects of the same sanctions against the people and for the MDC’s electoral benefit.
What went wrong is not difficult to see.
The same regime change forces who sponsored the parties getting the 47 percent vote and the 99 seats in 2008 also sponsored the non-governmental organisations (NGOs) who have been conducting so-called ‘voter education’ under various guises since the year 2000.
What kind of voter education?
‘One-person-one vote’ was brought to Zimbabwe through the barrel of the gun, borne by the freedom fighters of ZANLA and ZIPRA with the assistance of peasants.
The original sponsors of the MDC formations are the very same people who denied Zimbabweans ‘one-person-one vote’ until the gun brought that vote to us.
When Zimbabweans finally obtained one-person-one vote through war, they divided their cadres into two categories:
l Those voted into Parliament were supposed to unify the power of the bullet with the constitutional power of law-making, the Constitution and the law becoming the soft side of the power of the bullet and fulfilling the wisdom of the Gospel of Matthew where cadres are urged to be as vigilant and militant as the snake and as soft and diplomatic as the dove.
Real power was supposed to nurture both its vigilant, sharp and venomous snake-side and its soft constitutional, diplomatic and peace-making dove side.
But the two were supposed to be delicately synthesised and delicately unified.
That synthesis, that unity, is now threatened by parties that do not accept history or respect the legacy of the liberation movement which brought independence.
l The second group of our cadres were selected into the security ranks of the guardians of territory and economy, those in charge of the material, physical and economic integrity of Zimbabwe, those in charge of the sharp fangs and venomous edge of the bullet, 24 hours a day, seven days a week and 165 days a year. These cadres were made custodians of the cranes which could be used to bring the locomotive of the nation back on track in case the civilian leadership strayed and landed the train in the mud.
Now, what those who denied us the vote for 90 years have done is to use money, sanctions, corruption and hunger to purchase a significant portion of the soft-side of our vote with the intention, just like Hitler’s intention, ultimately to overrun the whole country, the entire people and all their assets.
Voter education sponsored by donors and conducted by NGOs can become a security hazard because it does not teach our history and does not reveal to those being educated the two basic values of the vote.
The vote has a quantitative, nominal value as well as a qualitative and strategic value.
The few African voters who qualified to vote on a separate voters’ roll in Rhodesia were taught to worship the vote as a fetish.
They were taught to value the ballot as an individual possession of nominal individual value without any strategic thinking or meaning on their part.
They were taught: “Your vote counts,” without asking: “But it counts for what?
It counts for whose benefit?”
Likewise, the significant 47 percent minority who voted for 99 MPs in the 2008 harmonised elections were also taught by ZESN that: “Your vote counts.”
Most of them were not told: “Your vote for the MDC counts for deepening and legalising sanctions.”
They were not told: “Your vote for the MDC counts for deepening and legalising British, US and EU sanctions.”
They were not told: “Your vote counts for increasing Anglo-Saxon influence in our Parliament.”
They were not told: “Your vote counts for reversing or weakening the African land revolution.”
The people of Germany who voted for the Nazis in 1920 were incapable of reading and anticipating Hitler’s intentions for Germany and for Europe.
In fact, most of them did not attempt to read the future or to study Hitler in order to obtain any clues about what he was likely to do after winning their vote.
They voted for him because he invoked their frustrations, their jealousies, their resentments, their envy and their hatreds.
He merely described the deplorable living conditions and the misery caused by sanctions while remaining vague about what he would do after capturing power.
As a result, Hitler’s party, by 1930, merely promised to be everything to every group, which means that it did not try to be ideologically consistent at all.
This is clear from its composition in 1930: manual workers, 28,1 percent; farmers, 14 percent; civil servants, 8,3 percent; self-employed persons, 20,7 percent; and salaried employees, 25,6 percent, of total party membership.
Therefore historian Craig concludes that:
“With a membership so diverse, the National Socialist Workers party (NSDAP) could not hope to be ideologically consistent, and this explains why it was easier to say what the Nazis were against than what they were for.”
The party had something which purported to be a programme, with 25 points altogether.
But as Craig writes:
“This was a confused mixture of nationalistic, anti-Semitic and pseudo-socialist demands, which were either exasperatingly vague or mutually contradictory.
(But) the defects of logic that contemptuous outsiders could point to in no way diminished the party’s appeal.
Inconsistency of programme did not bother this (lumpen) class as a whole or its more organised elements in the handicrafts and small trades.”
This is the situation Zimbabweans find themselves in today.
Many of them voted for change but that can mean almost anything.
The core of Hitler’s Nazi party in 1930 was made up of: “The most marginal stratum in Germany, squeezed as they were between the wealthy bourgeoisie on the one hand and the organized working class on the other, and apprehensive over what appeared to be the deterioration of their economic social condition.
This Mittelstand, the centre of German philistinism and Kitsch … was potentially the most revolutionary … because of its structural fluidity, its lack of leadership, and its resentment; and its gravitation toward National Socialism (Nazism) was portentous.”
It produced the holocaust not just for Germany but for most of Europe.
Yet it started with a seemingly innocent and democratically clean victory at the polls.
Economic sanctions against Germany had contributed greatly to the deteriorating conditions of living and to the mass resentment waiting to be exploited by a demagogue fascist.
This is what makes MDC-invited sanctions against Zimbabwe truly criminal.
For unlike the sanctions against Germany which the war-time allies attempted to legalise at Versailles in 1919, there is not even a semblance of legality about the Anglo-Saxon blockade against Zimbabwe.
In fact, the Anglo-Saxon powers and their MDC proxies in Zimbabwe did everything in their power to deny the glaring reality of their economic war against the people.
What is acknowledged is the literal material condition of the people, not the cause.
That is why, in most countries, anyone who invites economic sanctions against his or her own country must be charged with treason.
Economic sanctions always open up wide opportunities for other economic crimes against the targeted economy and people.
Hence the current sanctions regime is the incubator for rampant corruption, which explains why some elites in ZANU PF and even in Government were for a long time reluctant to study, analyse, explain and denounce the sanctions for what they are and what they have done to the people.
In Zimbabwe since 2002, as in Germany in 1930, sanctions created opportunities for the rich and powerful while driving the poor and the confused into the arms of manipulators.
These manipulators deny history and want to reduce voter education to a mechanical exercise like watching the printing of ballots or arguing over the alphabetical order of candidates on the ballot paper as if these were really the strategic issues.
They are not.
Above all, the manipulators in Germany were really big liars telling fat and tall lies.
The manipulators in Zimbabwe are doing the same.
Citizens should beware.
Dr Tafataona Mahoso writes in his personal capacity as an academic.